I was best man at a wedding in the D.C. area the day before, and had driven nonstop all night to make it to Huntsville. OK, nonstop minus three hour-long stops to zonk out at rest stops, but none of them gave me much rest, so they shouldn't count. If I had driven during daylight like a respectable member of society, I would have gotten a motel room somewhere along I-81 and lost all of Monday to driving. I now had all of Monday free for an extra day of caving.
Monday was my chance for big pits. I wanted to bounce a pit early, since they were technically uncomplicated, relatively low energy, and something I couldn't get at home. I hadn't been on rope in two years, and a sunlit pit would be a good starter.
As it turned out, I didn't bounce a pit or do any sort of caving Monday. Every weeklong trip (or even OTR trips) have those days where entropy wins and you don't do a damn thing the whole day. Usually they're at the end of the week, but I had mine on Monday.
I sat around with Mark, Jeralin and Peter, flipped through the guidebook, and talked about places to go. Mark, Jeri and Peter had just spent the weekend kayaking and caving through Mammoth Cave on a roundabout trip down to Huntsville. This was their rest day. It was mine too, but by default - all I had done recently was sit and steer.
What I should have done was skedaddle to the SERA booth as soon as I registered. There was an all-day graffiti removal workshop that started at 9:00, right when I arrived. It wouldn�t have been a pit, but it was worthwhile time underground.
I did get my first ever visit to a Waffle House Monday. Despite all my visits to West Virginia, I�ve never gone to this southern staple. The food tasted good - old socks will taste good when they're soaked in butter and fried - but it wasn't quite worth sacrificing a night of sleep.
I also got my umpteenth visit to a Wal-Mart. I picked up an LED headlamp for $12. I misplaced my Tikka earlier. The Wal-Mart light worked fantastic for me the whole week; LED technology is a wonderful thing.
The Monday night Howdy party was on the Fourth of July, so we had fireworks. It was a BBQ feast; I was disappointed I didn't witness any brawls about the legendary BBQ rivalries down south. The campground is a former airport in the center of Huntsville, so our central location let us see six or seven different displays.
Gary, Cramp, Seth and Becky from the Central Connecticut Grotto were all in attendance this week, and had their usual all-burly trips planned. I think they use the ACA guide to plot future trips. "Some guy broke his pelvis in this cave! We gotta do that!"
The most famous accident cave in TAG - outside of the Valhalla pit - is McBride's. It's a nine-drop wetsuit pulldown trip, and the site of a huge rescue when two people broke their legs during a flood.
I don't own a wetsuit, and have never worn one in a cave. I needed one in order to do this. Francois was nice enough to volunteer his over to me. He was still going on the trip: he doesn't get cold easily, and he'd double up on polypros nonetheless. Cois's sacrifice turned out not to be necessary, since Peter Welles has two wetsuits. I borrowed a shorty from him, and Cois got to keep his.
I was a bit skittish about McBrides, but I didn't want to spend another couple days twiddling my thumbs at camp. I have yet to have the need to assemble my own trips. I feel bad sometimes that I just glom onto other people's trips, but those other people seem to like arranging them.
At the parking area for McBrides, there was a pony wandering around. Not a horse, but a little three-foot-tall pony. He chewed the grass around us, and even took a nibble at my sneakers. We hatched a plan of making him carry the rope, but at the phrase 'pack animal' he disappeared.
The hike up to the entrance was sweltering. No one wore their wetsuits up. Most people wore a bare minimum to prevent an indecent exposure arrest. I wore my polypros and gloves; my fear was poison ivy, and any exposed skin was an opening. It was hot, but I went the whole week without a single scratch.
Some far-off rumblings saluted us as we reached the cave. The water level was low, but the cloud cover was certainly not our friend. We knew high water prompted injuries in this cave, but we were risking it.
(If you read that in an accident report, you'd wonder how stupid these people could be. But most of us make these stupid decisions all the time, and the odds work out. Think of all the times you've driven way too fast, or without a seat belt, or drunk. The odds worked out this time, and all other times this week.)
The first three drops were close enough so one of our ropes could reach the bottom of the third pit, I thought. So long as we're doing IRT (Indestructible Rope Technique), let's make another 90 foot pit out of these three nuisance drops.
The fifth drop is a the big guy, the 90 footer. You lower yourself into an 8-foot plunge pool (two feet high everywhere else, and scene of one of the broken legs) and rig yourself over the lip of a small but looooong water fall. This is why you wear the wetsuit. The rope follows the water the whole way down.
I was trying to stay dry, so I clung to the right wall and walked my way down as much of the drop as possible. It took a few minutes, but I got seventy feet down without getting a drop on my coveralls, or the wetsuit under it. But the last twenty feet bells out, so I had no wall to walk down. I kicked off, got splashed for the last twenty feet, and joined the wet cavers down at the bottom.
I put on my balaclava while the rest of the group came down. I looked like a ninja.
Mark Skove got banged up on the sixth drop when the thin rock ledge he stood on gave way. He didn't get seriously hurt, but had more bruises than the usual cave trip. I was in that category, too: I had some impressive gashes and cuts from McBrides.
The seventh drop is directly out of a wet crawl. When the water's high, you can't make this rig: the strong current carries you over the edge. The current was weak now, but I still had a problem. My rack was clipped into my harness, and my crawling had knocked a bar into the perpendicular position. I didn't have the leverage to wiggle it back into place.
Mark, fresh from his fall, shimmied over and helped me work the bar down to the right side. Only it was supposed to go on the left side. I was looking to start my rig with the side of the rack with only one bar, but both sides had at least two bars. Further wiggling got the stray bar back over, but it ate up fifteen or twenty minutes of teeth chattering time.
The eighth drop lowers into a big pool that, like the plunge pool, has an unseen deep part. Most people descended into the two-foot section, saw their friends strategically at the other end of what looked like a uniform wading pool, and walk across the span to get submerged. My descent was spastic and pendular enough so that my foot splashed in the deep spot well before I touched the shallow ground directly below me. I didn't understand at first why everyone was disappointed when I walked around the pool to join them.
After the ninth drop was the crawl out, a miserable half mile of alternating stream passage, crouching and hands and knees grunt work. Sharp karst poked us through our wetsuits, gave me a suicidal-looking slash on my wrist, and cut a second hole in the butt of my coveralls.
I needed to heal on Wednesday, so I jumped on another all-day conservation workshop: Speleothem repair. As it turned out, this class is not ideally suited for northeastern caves. The formations we saw documented were enormous - some weighing hundreds of pounds - and snapped off recently, lying on their sides. Broken formations in northeastern caves are normally stumps on the ceiling, with the broken piece on someone�s mantle fifty miles away.
To fix a formation, you epoxy it back on. Bigger jobs and less flush fits require a center bolt to hold them in place. Jacks and load-bearing wiring can hold stalactites in place while epoxy dries. Active formation will begin to heal themselves: sometimes you can come back a year or two later and a fresh coat of calcite is over the original crack.
Our trip that day was to Crossings Cave. I was hoping we'd get a chance to do some actual repair, but we were just here to observe. Crossings Cave was used for saltpeter mining during the Civil War, so a lot of the cave is easy walking passage, with dozens of names written on the walls. It's walking passage to the hundreds of thousands of formations, so the damaged ones could be from Lincoln's days.
There were so many formations, the thousands of broken parts were stacked like cord word. Matching them back up to their bases (most big ones were stalagmites) was tough. 150 years of dripping has altered the bases enough so that the puzzle pieces aren't precise any more. We couldn't help trying to match the pieces together. I don't think any of us got a match.
A reporter from the Birmingham News was accompanying us, along with a photographer. This wasn't a slow photo trip. The photographer was snapping pictures left and right, hundreds of exposures. He said the secret to good photography was just to shoot a lot, and increase your chances of a lucky good exposure. I was walking in front of him, so he had about a hundred pictures of my torn ass walking through formations.
He had a novel way to backlight formations without slave units. He gave the reporter a manual flash, and got him to stand behind the pretties. The photographer would snap the picture with his camera-mounted flash, and then leave the aperture open until the reporter saw the flash and triggered his own flash, a half-second process. If the photographer stayed still, he had his picture backlit successfully.
Huntsville doesn't carry Birmingham papers, so I wasn't able to pick up the paper. I checked the story online when I got back to New Jersey. The online layout didn't show any of the photos, and I wasn't quoted in the text of the story, so to hell with all of them.
Wednesday night was a very enjoyable trip to the U.S. Space and Rocket center. I'm a space nut who wanted to go to Spacecamp when I was a kid, so I was bouncing like a kid on a sugar rush the whole night.
I lost my ID badge on the Space Shot. What goes up does not always need to go down. No one really checks IDs during Convention, but I didn't want to sneak around when I had already paid, so I ran into the high school Thursday morning, where registration was moved.
The high school is built of eighteen and a half identical octagons stacked randomly. No wonder the town's full of rocket scientists: you've got to be one just to find your way to class. After my new badge got printed, I listened to a bit of the newsletter workshop (Hey, I went to a third of a session!) before ditching it to go caving.
Thursday was my chance for big pits, take two. We were going to War Eagle Cave. Unfortunately, we weren't the first people this day to have the idea to do War Eagle. By the time our four-car parade rolled into the parking area, there were already nine cars lined up. There's only a single rig point for War Eagle, and no one was looking to get bitten by mosquitos all day while waiting to rig a pit.
Plan B was Kennamer Cave, which was horizontal but had that signature big TAG borehole and offered a through trip. Like McBride's, this was a long slog up a steep slope. Why can't caves ever form on flat surfaces?
Kennamer started off with some crawling passage straight out of a northeastern cave. Hey, I'm on vacation here! I didn't drive to Alabama to test out my kneepads!
It opened up, though into ... enormous passages. Ceilings a hundred feet high, walls forty feet apart, and floors power washed clear of all but gravel. There was so much stuff to look at, we completely blew by the giant breakdown block dubbed Moby Dick, wherever it was. Too much other stuff to look at.
It's always bizarre yet low key when you run into another group underground. We knew Dom and Amos from the CNJG were in here, since their car was in the parking lot. Their group was looking at the only technically hard climb, and eventually decided to double back and skip it.
Our group soldiered through. I ended up in the end of the line, in a narrow crevice, so I couldn�t see the downclimb until our group was assembled at the bottom, ready to go. You had to lower yourself down to the one foothold within reach, which really wasn�t within reach. Allen rigged his handline, but since I was last, it had already been detached. I ended up bracing myself with my feet on the far wall, chimneying down as I could, and then jumping the last three feet. This soft borehole gravel comes in handy.
There was a miserable dirty crawl to get out. And I mean dirt: not mud, not slop, but spongy soil. We were all filthy by the time we saw daylight.
Fran�ois let slip that today was his birthday, so we had to do something to celebrate. We cut out of the Photo Salon after an hour, and went to the only French restaurant we could find in Huntsville. I was wondering if I was going to use my high school French, but the only person in this restaurant who�d be able to understand me would be Cois. That's not to say the food wasn't good: I had the best pheasant I've ever eaten. (Also the only pheasant.)
Most of us were in dirty caving T-shirts and shorts. We had a little mental preparedness before entering the elegant French restaurant, but that quickly faded from memory and loud conversations about sex and bodily functions resumed as usual.
Friday was my day for big pits, take three. There was a led trip to Natural Well, which was close enough to guarantee we could hit the banquet later that night. This was a led trip, and Allen, Cois, Andy and I had no problem with a led trip. Convention secret: half the people that sign up for led trips never show, so if you show up that morning, you'll most likely go caving even if you�ve never signed up.
Dave Drake was our guide, a local guy who knew Natural Wells and the other local pits like the back of his hand. "It's under 200 feet, but it's still considered one of the big boys," he said. Dave was especially nice for leading this trip, since he wasn't even going down the ropes. He was recovering from some injuries, and although he felt like he could handle a 180-foot ascent, he didn�t want to push himself. Besides, this stuff was his backyard.
There was a line for Natural Well, just like War Eagle, but Natural Well can accommodate multiple rigs. (Rig while you can, because the tree everyone rigs to is as hollow as a chocolate bunny.) We tied our rope after the first group came out, though, for politeness' sake.
After nine drops with a double rope, I wasn't used to the reduced friction of a single rope. I had five bars on the rack, and it still felt like I was sliding down the rope with a little too much momentum.
Friday morning I had lost a contact - in my eye. This happens with contact lens wearers: the little bugger will slip into an empty patch of our eye socket, and hang out there until the most inopportune time to pop free. I assumed this would be on rope, but I got through the descent incident-free.
Most of us wore T-shirts and shorts down into the pit. I changed into polypro pants, since I didn't want my filthy harness to ruin the shorts I had to wear to the banquet. Since I was one of the first people down, I was one of the first people up. I wasn't complaining: my T-shirt wasn't getting the job done after an hour or so in the pit.
As I was Ropewalking back up to the lip, I heard a shout that sounded like "Sean, how far are you?"
"ABOUT FORTY FEET FROM THE TOP!"
"NO, NOT YOU!" Fine, excuse me. Someone else named Sean at the lip. Or John; the names sound alike.
Thirty seconds later, "How are you doing?"
"ALMOST UP NOW!"
"NOT YOU!!!" Who was up there?
About fifteen children, that's who. While we were down in the pit, some JSS (Junior Speleological Society) cavers came by and were rigging the pit with their rope.
The JSS contingent wasn't the model of vertical competency. The counselors rigged the 180-foot pit with exactly 170 feet of rope, prompting a second rope to be rigged that actually reached the floor. The kids were running around, yelling "Off rope!" into the pit just for the hell of it. And when one of the counselors got a few feet into his descent, he realized he didn't have his helmet with him.
Our T-shirted crew was getting cold, so we got up as quick as possible. To save time, Allen and Andy climbed up tandem. We had time after our speedy job with Natural Well, so we checked out Hooper's Well. This was only 90 feet (it's mapped, and the map essentially looks like the letter U). We'd be going in one at a time, doing the true pit bounce.
There's a huge stalactite hanging down a solid 30 feet in the middle of the descent. It�s not as freehanging as it looks, Dave said, but it was still an impressive sight. Most of my vertical drops in McBride's weren't as long as this stalactite.
Three guys came along as Dave was setting up the rope, looking to do the pit. "Would you mind if we went down your rope?" They asked Dave. I could see his dilemma. Sure, it'd save THEM time, but it'd keep us here an extra hour. But to say no would be impolite. Dave said yes.
Those three guys cost us a lot of time. The first guy brought this camera, so he went at the speed of a one-man photo trip. Half an hour later, he came up and the second guy descended. He spent a long time dawdling down there, thinking he was waiting for the third guy to descend before ascending. Every five minutes we'd shout down if he was doing OK, and he always shouted back that he was doing fine. And he was; we weren't shouting the right question down. The third guy didn't have gear, and was borrowing it from the first guy. But he didn't have a clue how to use it, and so the first guy, apologizing all the way, wouldn't let him descend. The third guy turned pissy, saying "I only get one time a year on rope, and it would have been today."
It was a two cave day, and I got back in plenty of time to shower and clean up for the banquet. I even got my contact out, which I had forgotten was even in my eye midway through the Natural Well trip.
Too bad I didn't have any shirts that didn�t reek of mildew. The oft-theatening rains got in my tent a little, just enough to get soaked up by my T-shirts. I tried drying them, but every time I remembered I had clothes spread out, they were wet from rain or dew, and I might as well leave them out for the next shot at dryness.
I said adios to Cois and Allen at the banquet, since they were driving directly to Nashville to catch a flight back. I had one more led trip the next morning to go on, but even if that wasn't on the schedule I had seen borehole, vertical pits, formations on a colossal scale, and the sort of pulldown obstacle course that only gets made in certain parts of the world. I was coming back happy - although still bleeding from McBride's.